Strong is the elder statesman of lifting apps — on the App Store since 2011, a 4.9-star average across roughly 108,000 ratings, and essentially bug-free. In a category full of apps that reinvent themselves every year, that stability is worth something real.
Its standalone Apple Watch app is the best in lifting. You can leave your phone in your bag and log entire sessions from your wrist. Nothing else does this as well.
Where Strong wins
- The Apple Watch app. Genuinely standalone, not a companion. If you hate training with your phone, this is the reason to pick Strong.
- Stability. Fifteen years of iteration. It does not crash and it does not lose your data.
- Plate and warm-up calculators, body measurements, CSV export (PRO).
- Price. PRO at roughly $29.99/yr is fair.
What it deliberately is not
It does not think
Strong makes no attempt to program for you. There is no AI, no auto-generated sessions, no progression algorithm. You build the routine, you decide the loads, you decide when to back off. It shows you your last session and your PRs; the rest is you.
For a lifter running a program they trust, that is not a flaw — it is the appeal. For everyone else, it means every one of the decisions that actually drive progress is being made on instinct, at 6 a.m., and the app is a witness rather than a participant.
No nutrition, therefore no context
Strong has no food logging. It syncs to Apple Health, which will pass it a calorie-burn number, but it does not know what you ate — and that is the number that determines what you can recover from.
So when your bench stalls for three weeks, Strong shows you three flat lines. It cannot tell you whether that is fatigue that needs a deload, or a deficit that needs less volume, or simply not enough protein — because those three diagnoses require data Strong has never had access to. This is the gap that runs through the whole category.
Where Gymrock is different
Gymrock does the logging job — sets, reps, load, RPE, in-session — and adds the two things Strong does not have: your food, and a model that reads both.
One message every Monday at 7 a.m.: push, hold, or pull back, with the reasoning shown. The flat bench line stops being a mystery and becomes a diagnosis.
The honest trade: Strong's Apple Watch app is better than ours. If wrist-only logging is non-negotiable for you, weigh that seriously.
Which should you pick?
| If you… | Pick |
|---|---|
| Want to log from your watch without your phone | Strong |
| Run your own program and just want a reliable notebook | Strong |
| Value fifteen years of stability above all | Strong |
| Track food as well as lifts | Gymrock |
| Want something that decides, not just records | Gymrock |
| Are cutting and want your volume adjusted for it | Gymrock |